Many patients go blind even after diagnosis and treatment for the disease has been instituted. One classic example is glaucoma. The treatment of glaucoma requires the patient to instill eye drops on a daily basis in order to preserve their sight.
Studies have shown that close to 60% of patients had difficulties with self-administration of eye drops. Current means to administer topical ocular drugs requires the skill of not only administering a correct amount, but also mastering a rather difficult technique. Some of the most limiting steps to administering eye drops are inverting the bottle so as to allow fluid flow to the bottle tip, fright reaction, and bending the neck.
The problems described by patients included: raising their arms above their heads, tilting their heads, holding the inverted bottle and squeezing the bottle with the arms raised, directing the bottle on top of the eye without touching the eye, fear of hitting the eye leading the bottle to the held too high or away from the eye, involuntary blinking or closing eyes after squeezing the bottle, placing the correct number of eye drops, and poor view of the tip of the bottle. The prior art relies on squeeze-bottles, which must be inverted and positioned in an essentially up side down position for use.
In addition, patients with glaucoma frequently need to use more than one medication, which requires having two bottles. Patients tend to misplace bottles, and then sometimes only one eye drop is used, instead of the two medications needed to preserve sight. It would be therefore, an advantage to have paired medications and paired-products which allows the patient to have only one specialized container for the different eye drops.
Furthermore, delivering oral medications to patients, and in particular children requires using a pressure-based system such as a syringe or tipping the medication bottle upside down. The same occur when using ear medication in which the patient must tilt their head and the bottle is held upside down.